A Spirit in Prison Part 81

"Who's there? Who is it?"

"Vere!" called the mother.

As she called she tried the door, and found it locked.

"Madre! It's you!"

"Yes. May I come in?"

"One tiny moment."

The voice within sounded surely a little startled and uneven, certainly not welcoming. There was a pause. Hermione heard the rustling of paper, then a drawer shut sharply.

Vere was hiding away her poems!

When Hermione understood that she felt the strong, good impulse suddenly shrivel within her, and a bitter jealousy take its place. Vere came to the door and opened it.

"Oh, come in, Madre! What is it?" she asked.

In her bright eyes there was the look of one unexpectedly disturbed.

Hermione glanced quickly at the writing-table.

"You--you weren't writing my note to Monsieur Emile?" she said.

She stepped into the room. She wished she could force Vere to tell her about the poems, but without asking. She felt as if she could not continue in her present condition, excluded from Vere's confidence. Yet she knew now that she could never plead for it.

"No, Madre. I can do it to-morrow."

Vere looked and sounded surprised, and the mother felt more than ever like an intruder. Yet something dogged kept her there.

"Are you tired, Vere?" she asked.

"Not a bit."

"Then let us have a little talk."

"Of course."

Vere shut the door. Hermione knew by the way she shut it that she wanted to be alone, to go on with her secret occupation. She came back slowly to her mother, who was sitting on a chair by the bedside. Hermione took her hand, and Vere pushed up the edge of the mosquito-curtain and sat down on the bed.

"About those books of Emile's--" Hermione began.

"Oh, Madre, you're not going to--But you've promised!"

"Yes."

"Then I may?"

"Why should you wish to read such books? They will probably make you sad, and--and they may even make you afraid of Emile."

"Afraid! Why?"

"I remember long ago, before I knew him, I had a very wrong conception of him, gained from his books."

"Oh, but I know him beforehand. That makes all the difference."

"A man like Emile has many sides."

"I think we all have, Madre. Don't you?"

Vere looked straight at her mother. Hermione felt that a moment had come in which, perhaps, she could force the telling of that truth which already she knew.

"I suppose so, Vere; but we need not surely keep any side hidden from those we love, those who are nearest to us."

Vere looked a little doubtful--even, for a moment, slightly confused.

"N--o?" she said.

She seemed to consider something. Then she added:

"But I think it depends. If something in us might give pain to any one we love, I think we ought to try to hide that. I am sure we ought."

Hermione felt that each of them was thinking of the same thing, even speaking of it without mentioning it. But whereas she knew that Vere was doing so, Vere could not know that she was. So Vere was at a disadvantage. Vere's last words had opened the mother's eyes. What she had guessed was true. This secret of the poems was kept from her because of her own attempt to create and its failure. Abruptly she wondered if Vere and Emile had ever talked that failure over. At the mere thought of such a conversation her whole body tingled. She got up from her chair.

"Well, good-night, Vere," she said.

And she left the room, leaving her child amazed.

Vere did not understand why her mother had come, nor why, having come, she abruptly went away. There was something the matter with her mother.

She had felt that for some time. She was more conscious than ever of it now. Around her mother there was an atmosphere of uneasiness in which she felt herself involved. And she was vaguely conscious of the new distance between them, a distance daily growing wider. Now and then, lately, she had felt almost uncomfortable with her mother, in the sitting-room when she was saying good-night, and just now when she sat on the bed. Youth is terribly quick to feel hostility, however subtle.

The thought that her mother could be hostile to her had never entered Vere's head. Nevertheless, the mother's faint and creeping hostility--for at times Hermione's feeling was really that, thought she would doubtless have denied it even to herself--disagreeably affected the child.

"What can be the matter with Madre?" she thought.

She went over to the writing-table, where she had hastily shut up her poems on hearing the knock at the door, but she did not take them out again. Instead she sat down and wrote the note to Monsieur Emile. As she wrote the sense of mystery, of uneasiness, departed from her, chased away, perhaps, by the memory of Monsieur Emile's kindness to her and warm encouragement, by the thought of having a long talk with him again, of showing him certain corrections and developments carried out by her since she had seen him. The sympathy of the big man meant a great deal to her, more even than he was aware of. It lifted up her eager young heart. It sent the blood coursing through her veins with a new and ardent strength. Hermione's enthusiasm had been inherited by Vere, and with it something else that gave it a peculiar vitality, a power of lasting--the secret consciousness of talent.

Now, as she wrote her letter, she forgot all her uneasiness, and her pen flew.

At last she sighed her name--"Vere."

She was just going to put the letter into its envelope when something struck her, and she paused. The she added:

"P.S.--Just now Madre gave me leave to read your books."

CHAPTER XXV

The words of the old Oriental lingered in the mind of Artois. He was by nature more fatalistic than Hermione, and moreover he knew what she did not. Long ago he had striven against a fate. With the help of Gaspare he had conquered it--or so he had believed till now. But now he asked himself whether he had not only delayed its coming. If his suspicion were well founded,--and since his last visit to the island he felt as if it must be,--then surely all he had done with Gaspare would be in vain at the last.